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First, the good: Giving appears to be ticking up. It rose nationally 7.5 percent last year, according to Dallas-based philanthropic research firm Atlas of Giving . But it expects growth in giving this year to slow to just a 3.9 percent increase.

William Daroff: Now Is Not the Time to Discourage Charitable Giving: I was hopeful that the new White House budget released last week would be more friendly to charities and charitable tax deductions than the proposed budgets in past years. Yet I was once again disappointed. Fortunately, thanks to the overwhelming number of Members of Congress from both parties who understand the critical importance the tax code plays in incentivizing charitable contributions, it is unlikely that the proposal will become law.

Multiplication Philanthropy - Dan Pallotta - Harvard Business Review: The cutting edge is investment in fundraising. Yet everyone tries to suppress it, invoking a flawed theory of social change that says the less you spend on fundraising, the more you have for programs. That's true if it's a zero sum game. But it's not. Imagine a $10 million pie with $8 million going to programs and with the 20% fundraising slice taking $2 million away from programs. The last thing we want to do is make that a $3 million slice, leaving only $7 million for programs. But that's not how it works. If done correctly, the extra million enlarges the pie — substantially. A $10 million pie becomes a $15 million pie, and the $7 million available for programs grows to $12 million.

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Sharing Nonprofit Collaboration Knowledge and Experience | Stanford Social Innovation Review: One of the best outcomes of the Lodestar Foundation’s Collaboration Prize (a competition to identify the best nonprofit collaboration) is the Nonprofit Collaboration Database, a searchable database of nonprofit collaboration models in the US that were submitted through the competition. There are currently 670 collaboration examples in the database, which was recently upgraded and is now housed on the Foundation Center’s website. I spoke with Cynthia Bailie, director of the Foundation Center’s Cleveland office and of Special Information Initiatives, about the improvements to the database. Cynthia explained that the Foundation Center had two goals for the upgrade: 1) to encourage community dialogue and share knowledge around nonprofit collaboration; and 2) to allow nonprofits from anywhere in the world to submit their collaboration stories to a growing collection of models.

And unsurprisingly, COF is largely focused on tax proposals this year. The proposal to flatten the private foundation excise tax, currently a confusing two-tiered tax that most foundation and nonprofit policy people think should be simplified to something in the one percent range, not only gets endorsed broadly within the nonprofit sector, but usually in the federal budget proposals of successive presidents.

Top 20 fundraising universities - CBS News: The 20 schools that enjoyed the largest charitable windfalls received 27.2 percent of all of the contributions people made to colleges and universities in 2011. That's mind boggling considering that these schools represent only 2 percent of the 1,009 institutions surveyed. Here is another fact that illustrates just how lopsided higher-ed giving is: 25 percent of the institutions attracted 86 percent of the donations.

In contrast, the bottom half of institutions, in terms of donations, attracted a mere 4.5 percent of charitable contributions.

The AFP Blog: Add it all together with the newer generations’ interest in engagement and philanthropy, and I think we’ll see a lot of young people join the profession over the coming years. That’s why we created the Young Professional category, and the influx will help keep the profession vibrant with new energy and perspective.

Private foundations with less than $10 million in assets increased giving by 20.6 percent compared to 2010, whereas foundations with assets between $10 million and $50 million scaled back their giving by 7.8 percent from 2010.

Before you sign your nonprofit up for an insurance plan, there are some questions to be answered. In her book “Good Counsel,” Lesley Rosenthal presents nine questions your legal counsel should ask about your nonprofit’s insurance arrangements:

We should (and usually do) work hard to make our best possible case for support to corporations … wanting them to know as much as possible about us. But an equally important issue is, “What do we know about them?”

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

The January job numbers seem to confirm the view of many that the U.S. economy, while still battling headwinds, is picking up steam. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 243,000 nonfarm payroll jobs were created in January, with large gains in professional and business services, leisure and hospitality, and manufacturing.

Irwin Jacobs strives to make lives better | UTSanDiego.com: He and his wife, Joan, graciously accepted the billionaire challenge from Warren Buffett and Bill Gates to pledge at least half of their considerable fortune to philanthropic causes. Well known are the La Jolla couple’s generous pledges to medical care, research, education and the arts. These include $120 million to the San Diego Symphony, a similar amount to UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering, $75 million to a specialty UCSD hospital, $30 million to the Salk Institute of Biological Studies. The Chronicle of Philanthropy ranked them as the 22nd most generous U.S. donors in 2011, with gifts totaling $64.9 million last year alone.

Now, seven years after Banks’s death, her heirs have taken Hopkins to court, alleging that the university has violated the terms of the deal it made with Banks 23 years ago. University officials maintain that they are abiding by Banks’s wishes as outlined in the two-page agreement.

Now, seven years after Banks’s death, her heirs have taken Hopkins to court, alleging that the university has violated the terms of the deal it made with Banks 23 years ago. University officials maintain that they are abiding by Banks’s wishes as outlined in the two-page agreement.

This is the second semester Ron Pitcock’s Nature of Giving class has been offered money to donate to charities. There are 25 students in his class who have the task of deciding how to divide up the money.

Giving products to charities boosts corporate bottom lines, reduces waste in landfills, and provides relief for people in need, say The Business Case for Product Philanthropy by the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University.

Sir Howard Davies, former director of the London School of Economics and patron of Pro Bono Economics, made the claim to an audience of economists and charities in his lecture entitled ‘Why do people give their money away and how can we stop them acting so irrationally?’ at PricewaterhouseCooper’s London Bridge offices on February 7th.

A Receipt Is Not a Thank You: Online Donors vs Online Buyers: So, why do nonprofits not worry about their online thank yous as much as their mailed thank yous? Why do thank you letters seem to warrant time and attention while the attitude toward online thank yous seems so nonchalant? This seems especially odd given that we also know that attrition for first time donors, especially online, is extremely high. Those donors are worth a lot, but only if we keep them.

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